Emily Dickinson’s poetic form, with her four-line stanzas, ABCB rhyme schemes, and alternations in iambic meter between tetrameter and trimeter, is derived from Psalms and Protestant hymns, Dickinson systematically takes the forms interposing rhythmic dashes intended to interrupt the meter and indicate the short pauses. Her subjects are most often parts of the topography of her own psyche. Dickenson explores her feelings with conscientious and often painful honesty but never loses sight of their poetic application. One of Dickenson’s greatest techniques is to write about her own emotions in a kind of universal homiletic tone. For example, “After great pain, a formal feeling comes” this seems to describe the reader’s mind as well as it does hers.
This poem is unique because it compares a small object the brain to vast, huge spaces like the sky and ocean as well as such a large figure, God. At the beginning of the poem it sets up the first comparison between the brain and the sky. Dickenson claims that the brain is wider than the sky, yet follows up with “For-put them side …show more content…
The meter of “The Soul selects her own Society” is more irregular and halting than the typical Dickinson poem, although it still roughly fits her usual structure: iambic trimeter with the occasional line in a tetrameter. It is also uncharacteristic in that its rhyme scheme if we count half-rhymes such as “Gate” and “Mat”—is ABAB, rather than ABCB; the first and third lines rhyme, as well as the second and fourth. However, by using long dashes to interrupt the flow of the meter and effect brief pauses throughout, the poem’s form remains recognizably Dickinsonian, despite its atypical